But I felt it necessary to be part of the war effort and I enlisted in the Navy to be a flyer.

But the prospects of designing chemical plants for industrial scale chemical processes seemed far less interesting than the chemical events that occur in biological systems.

But I felt it necessary to be part of the war effort and I enlisted in the Navy to be a flyer.

That work led to the emergence of the recombinant DNA technology thereby providing a major tool for analyzing mammalian gene structure and function and formed the basis for me receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.

With time, many of the facts I learned were forgotten but I never lost the excitement of discovery.

Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.